Background. Characterisation of fuel consumption provides critical insights into fire behaviour, effects, and emissions. Stand-replacing prescribed fire experiments in central Utah offered an opportunity to generate consumption estimates in coordination with other research efforts.
The 2023 Canadian forest fires have been extreme in scale and intensity with more than seven times the average annual area burned compared to the previous four decades. Here, we quantify the carbon emissions from these fires from May to September 2023 on the basis of inverse modelling of satellite carbon monoxide observations.
Invasive annual grasses are often facilitated by fire, yet they can become ecologically dominant in susceptible locations even in the absence of fire. We used an extensive vegetation plot database to model susceptibility to the invasive annual grass cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.) in the sagebrush biome as a function of climate and soil water availability variables.
Managing fire ignitions for resource benefit decreases fuel loads and reduces the risk of high-severity fire in fire-suppressed dry conifer forests. However, the reintroduction of low-severity wildfire can injure trees, which may decrease their growth after fire.
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Historical and contemporary policies and practices, including the suppression of lightning-ignited fires and the removal of intentional fires ignited by Indigenous peoples, have resulted in over a century of fire exclusion across many of the USA’s landscapes.
As global wildfire activity increases, wildlife are facing greater exposure to hazardous smoke pollution – with unknown consequences for biodiversity. Research on the effects of smoke on wild animals is extremely limited, in part due to the inherent logistical challenges of observing how animals respond to smoke in real time.
Parcel-level risk (PLR) describes how wildfire risk varies from home to home based on characteristics that relate to likely fire behavior, the susceptibility of homes to fire, and the ability of firefighters to safely access properties.